Installing CFEngine on a Joyent Cloud smartmachine

The term ‘cloud‘ is bandied about quite readily these days. To my mind there is one operating system that can actually be called a ‘cloud operating system‘ – SmartOS. I’ll dedicate another post to the differences that distinguish SmartOS from other OS in this ‘cloud’ space, but for now, take my word for it 🙂

I’m going to be setting up a medium sized infrastructure based on Joyent ‘smartmachines‘ – which you can think of as non-Global zones (for those from the Solaris world).

So, let’s get started.

First, we create our smartmachine – I’ve opted for a 2vCPU and 2GB machine for now, I can easily resize as required in the future thanks to SmartOS. Once I’ve logged in I make sure my base OS is up to date:

pkgin -fy update && pkgin -fy upgrade

This should pull down anything needs upgrading and leave you with a nice new smartmachine ready to roll.

Now, handily the chaps at Joyent have provided a quick guide to install CFEngine which I’ll be basing this tutorial around at this stage. It’s pretty basic but it get’s you to a good place to move forward from. Bear in mind that it seems to be geared toward installing a Global Zone within the Joyent SDC product.

First we need to install some pre-req’s using the pkgin installation system on smartmachines: